ORIGIN

$6950 1958 Berkeley SE-328 Roadster Project

This 1958 Berkeley SE-328 Roadster is offered as a project but in very complete and original shape. This is one of the cars with the wacky headlight pods, and we love seeing these with the original hubcaps and moto engine fitted. Find it here on eBay in Orlando, Florida for $6950. Special thanks to BaT reader GBF for this submission!

Comments

I had one of these back in 1960. Wheelbase was 69 inches. Two big issues,: 1- they were chain drive to the front wheels and the sprocket on he differential tended to dissolve in chain oil.

2- the engine was built as a 1, 2 or 3 cylinder assembly and there was a wood ruff key between the crankshaft segments at the cylinder boundaries and if the cylinder opposite the starter/dynamo misfired during start-up, it sometimes sheered the key. I can only imagine how much worse it was in the 3 cylinder version.

So 69 rich wheelbase, good legroom ( I was 6′ 4″), no heater, but it would be a fun project to mount a modern FWD engine/tyranny in and add heat and a/c plus maybe a cool flame job on the paint.

To Michelle,I first saw one 40 years ago parked at a garage where it had died . The mechanic told me the most important thing to remember is to never baby the engine,ALWAYS rev the guts out it to prevent the piston seizing . Strange as it sounds, the harder you drive it,the better it will run. The one I saw had been lugged in top up a hill and overheated ,seizing the piston .it was still there a couple of years later but I never did buy it.

I bought one about 5 years ago in NW Orlando. It had been cut into 5 pieces and stored in an attic. The engine and drivetrain was gone. Wasn’t sure what I’d ever do with it, so I sold it to a fellow in South Florida. It’s now been stretched and attached to an early Spitfire chassis…looks even better than the original!

@ Gordini: Lucky you, then, to have been spared from any such danger, as someone else has volunteered for ownership.

Yes, I’m sure that an SUV could run right over you, and the driver wouldn’t even be distracted from his cell phone. So driving something like this would require the same kind of alertness one needs for riding motorcycles and scooters in traffic – not a bad practice anyway, really. As one who has driven things like Minis and Fiat 500s out amongst the semi trucks – and being made of steel just means your remains will be harder to pry out – I can certainly relate.

@ Michelle: Congratulations! You would appear to be the perfect buyer for this, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one who thinks so. Good price, too.

@ JPSO86: If I could stack cars in garages the way some collectors around here do, I could probably fit three or four more into mine, but I haven’t the knack. I’ve been to Car Night gatherings where guys had maybe twenty cars in a four-car garage, all parked inches from each other. Maybe they rent a forklift?

Hey guys, I was the buyer here. Sourced the windshield right away and planning shipping for next week if possible. Car comes to Oregon for sympathetic resto just to get it running and driving to start. I’ll deal with the cosmetics later. I’ve wanted one of these ever since I saw my first one at the giant April auto swap meet two decades ago. Curiously enough, the very same swap meet starts tomorrow. Karma.

Just looked: 3″ too long. Damn! If it had a swing-up or rollup door, you could let the butt hang out … I do know it’d fit in a 3/4 ton pickup bed, because a Spridget sans bumpers does. Long story, so just take my word for it.

Maybe the best part of this deal is how cheap the shipping could be. You could hire some guy with a pickup, or just crate it and send it truck freight. Might even fit in the overhead ;-)

Really, I’m kinda grateful this is down in Florida. If it were in, say, Burbank I’d be rehearsing the speech to Better Half about how it’ll fit in the back of the garage sideways, maybe up in the rafters …

Of course he will – he just needs to source the headlights themselves. Everything else is there, I think.

That was a fair price, I think. Much rarer car than the $8K Fiat 600, and much more interesting if a good deal less useful. From the looks of the upholstery, I should think you could source most of your replacement pieces from a good patio shop …

Dirk speaks truth: my 500 had those pods. As for the complaint about the photos’ lacking some way to calculate the size of this, well, those headlights are 7″ across. See how HUGE they look? Yes, this is one teeny tiny car. And if you want to know what this looks like without those pods, just go back to the Ebay pics. There’s one shot with the pods off. There’s also the picture of the spare bits, top etcetera, and the rusty spidery-looking things are, I believe, the brackets to mount the Euro headlights behind the covers (which were also illegal then).

I’m a bit concerned about the torn fiberglass on both sides of that rear panel. The bodies are flimsy enough already, and those corners, when intact, should help to stiffen the cockpit edge a bit. That tearing doesn’t look like something you can just glue back into place, either; it’s going to take some hard and careful work to build it back without making it ugly.

Anyway, I’ve seen much uglier Berkeleys than this one. A guy in Anchorage had one he’d stuffed – and that’s exactly the best word – a Harley engine into, with no thought or bother given to integrate it into the overall design. It was the miniature equivalent of those Willys or Fiat dragsters with the blown Hemi towering over everything. I never saw it run, but was told it showed up at an autocross or two and never ran well.

I think the pods are to comply with Federal light requirements that were imposed in the late fifties: If a car had a single light on each side it had to be a 7inch seal beam. it also had to be a certain number of inches from the ground. Not really a problem for most cars, but smaller cars could only comply to the requirement by grafting a “pod” to the original body. The US spec 1958-1959 Fiat 500 Nuova also had larger than euro spec lights and pods grafted to its nose to meet these requirements.

Can’t help but be gushingly in love with this car. It’s like a puppy sports car. Complete enough, it seems, to be the mythical easy restoration and simple enough that it should come in at a very reasonable cost even if you are lavish in the process.

Sure, it would be tempting to drop in any of a number of cycle engines for a spike in the fun quotient, but it really should stay stock, IMHO, if the Excelsior has any reasonable life left in it or if one can be sourced reasonably. This is, after all, a matching numbers car, and who knows how much fun the suspension can absorb.

It seems red is the common color, but if the body could be prepped to a suitable level for a good outcome I’d love to see it in black.

Overall, AWESOME!

I think I’ll leave a note for the UPS driver to leave it between the doors if I’m not home to sign for delivery.

OMG, is that the back of the door skin you can see through the giant holes in the inside of the doors? I find it funny that the Feds looked this over and decided that, for it to be completely safe, what was really important was to move the headlights higher.

Yet another ad featuring my pet peeve: NO PERSON standing next to the car for a size reference. Or a Toyota, or a Jetski, mower, or anything. When the SIZE of a item is one of the major features of said item SHOW THE DAMN SIZE!

@Mark E — the real 1950s version of the Morgan twin was… the Morgan F-Super! (It remained in production until 1952.) I think a lot of foreign cars had to be modified or restyled for the US market in the mid-1950s — Morgans in the post flat-radiator period, TRs (I think the smallmouth had slightly lower headlights). MGs? 1968 regs disallowed anything over the headlights, so Citroens and Jaguars had to change their styling too. Does anybody know whether the 3/4″ height adjuster ring above the MacPherson struts on a BMW 2002 were to raise the headlights?

I found one of these 30 years ago in a barn north of Chicago. Got all excited until I did some research; owner didn’t want to sell and the engine was missing. Good article w/ pix on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Cars. I remember headlight height regulations caused many cars to change the headlight design; E-type Jaguars were another.

I live in Orlando if anyone wants me to examine it before bidding. This Saturday is the All-British Car Show here; I wonder if the owner will bring it there.

Back in my college days when these were current, I had a friend who bought one new. It was fun to drive, but there was one major problem: When you parked it and went someplace, you could never be quite sure how or where you would find it. Four (or more) husky college students could pick the thing up and carry it. It was not rare to return to find the car sitting on the sidewalk or in the middle of somebodies lawn.

This little guy has everything for a local driver except safety, but maybe it is safer than a scooter. The only hard part appears to be the place above the seats where someone couldn’t fit and sat on the fiberglass! Such a cheap great car to have!

Buried somewhere in the depths of decades old U.S. automobile safety regulations must be a requirement that all improvements in the name of safety have to make the car at least 73% uglier than it would be without said safety improvement. In this case, they exceeded that percentage with room to spare.